Book Review
Rooted in rootlessness: Ancient poetic form meets an age of anomie
Mark Austin
Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer
(Sep. 23, 2006)
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/features/book/20060923TDY22001.htm
Ferris Wheel:
101 Modern and Contemporary Tanka
Translated by Kozue Uzawa
and Amelia Fielden
Cheng & Tsui, 130 pp, 19.95 dollars
The rise to ubiquity of the keitai denwa (mobile phone) has had an
interesting and beneficial side effect that in retrospect should have
been easy to predict--it has breathed new life into the 1,300-year-
old Japanese poetic form called tanka.
Less well known in the West than its shorter (17-syllable) cousin the
haiku, a tanka is a poem conventionally arranged in phrases of 5, 7,
5, 7 and 7 syllables. The extra 14 syllables provide greater scope
for thematic exposition.
The keitai's omnipresence, portability and convenient features, such
as character transposition and predictive text functions, make it an
ideal medium for the composition and dissemination of tanka.
Commuting, meanwhile, is an unpleasant fact of life for most of the
80 percent of the people in this country who live in densely
populated urban areas. Using one's keitai to write poetry on the
train has become a pleasant--and constructive--form of escapism for a
growing number of them.
In 2002, NHK responded to the emergence of the "keitai tanka boom" by
launching a radio program devoted to the form. Since going on air,
Doyo no Yoru wa Keitai Tanka (Let's Make Tanka on Mobile Phones on
Saturday Night) has received tens of thousands of entries, many of
which take as their subject the vagaries of love.
Classical tanka feature makurakotoba (pillow words)--highly stylized,
allusive locutions that amplify and add resonance to words or phrases
that follow--and are characterized by an intense engagement with the
natural world. The writers and readers of tanka in preindustrial
Japan shared a grammar of meaning that was rooted in nature.
Contemporary tanka of the kind featured in Doyo no Yoru wa Keitai
Tanka, by contrast, are enjoyed by an audience whose members share an
entirely different semantic grammar--one rooted in rootlessness.
Ferris Wheel: 101 Modern and Contemporary Tanka is a charming
anthology of works by Japanese tanka poets born between the late 19th
and late 20th centuries, a period of enormous upheaval for Japan.
The poems, which reflect the apparent shift in Japanese people's
worldview from sociocentrism toward egocentricism that accompanied
rapid urbanization and its attendant anomie, are presented in English
translation, in the original Japanese, and in romanized
transliteration. As translator Kozue Uzawa points out, when tanka are
translated literally from Japanese to English, "the number of
syllables used in the translation usually settles down around 20."
The title work, by award-winning poet Kyoko Kuriki (1954-), goes:
ferris wheel
go round and round!
memories last
one day for you
a lifetime for me
kanransha
mawareyo maware
omoide wa
kimi niwa hitohi
ware niwa hitoyo
Is the poet addressing the Ferris wheel or a lost lover? Ambiguity is
one characteristic of tanka; another is linkage of outer and inner
worlds. Motoko Michiura (1947-) was active in the political struggle
against the renewal of the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty in 1970. Here
she links the personal and political with an arresting image:
exhausted
from the police interrogation
I get home at midnight
my period starts
like rage
shirabe yori
tsukare omotaku
modoru mayo
ikari no gotoku
seiri hajimaru
Avant-garde playwright and director Shuji Terayama (1935-1983) began
writing tanka in his late teens, when he was hospitalized with
nephritis, the disease that was to kill him. This rueful poem by him
articulates the alone-in-the-crowd feeling at the heart of modern tanka:
sadness
a fruit ripening
on my palm--
I don't pass it
to anyone
kanashimi wa
hitotsu no kajitsu
tenohira no
ue ni uretsutsu
tewatashi mo sezu
(Sep. 23, 2006)
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